Devoted Eclectichttp://elizabethlhuede.com
...reflections & reviewsThu, 26 Mar 2015 23:41:43 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/http://0.gravatar.com/blavatar/ad3ae7c00ee4eab9ce9e37164195b54f?s=96&d=http%3A%2F%2Fs2.wp.com%2Fi%2Fbuttonw-com.pngDevoted Eclectichttp://elizabethlhuede.com
Watching You by Michael Robothamhttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/03/27/watching-you-by-michael-robotham/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/03/27/watching-you-by-michael-robotham/#commentsThu, 26 Mar 2015 23:30:26 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4445]]>Before picking up a copy of Watching You with a stack of other books at the library before Christmas, the only story I’d read by Michael Robotham was Bombproof. I remember having enjoyed Bombproof as a fast-paced, witty thriller, and I have intended to read more of Robotham’s work ever since.

It’s a measure of Robotham’s skill as a storyteller that I didn’t immediately pick this story as part of a series. As it turns out it’s Book 7 in the Joe O’Loughlin series. Joe is a clinical psychologist who has a history and faces health challenges, but the story doesn’t really belongs to him. It belongs to one of his patients, Marnie, a woman with a traumatic childhood and a missing husband.

Marnie’s husband Daniel wasn’t the best of husbands. An Aussie journalist living in London and a victim of newspaper downsizing, he took up gambling and disappeared leaving a trail of debts. Nevertheless, Marnie refuses to believe he abandoned her. With no joy from the police investigation and growing evidence Daniel was hiding something from her, now she is being hounded by his creditors. Unable to access his bank accounts or life insurance money, she is forced into desperate acts to pay his debts and keep from being evicted from their home. She is also desperate for help for their sick child, four-year-old Elijah.

Marnie’s behaviour doesn’t impress Zoe, her teenaged daughter from her first marriage. Troubled and resentful of her mum, Zoe misses her step-dad; she can’t understand why their TV has been hocked, and why her mother is suddenly dressing up at night and being met by a chauffeur who takes her out. Zoe seeks solace online and, unknown to her mother, sets up a Facebook page dedicated to trying to find her missing father. That isn’t the only thing she hides from Marnie.

To the world, Marnie is the epitome of the battler struggling against immense odds. To cope, she seeks help from her clinical psychologist, Joe O’Loughlin, but she isn’t entirely truthful to Joe. She doesn’t tell him, for example, that she has had mental health problems before. Nor does she mention that people who cross her have a habit of ended up being harmed. She does hint, however, that she has a feeling she is being watched.

Watching You is an interesting page-turner from a series which features some apparently already well-loved characters. It also reads well as a stand-alone novel. There were times when I felt I was reading more to assess Robotham’s skill as a storyteller, rather than being engaged in the story, but this didn’t detract from my enjoyment. I’m looking forward to reading Robotham’s latest novel, Life or Death, which I’ve heard great things about.

~

So that I don’t entirely lose my focus on supporting books by Australian women this year, I’d like, when I can, to recommend books by Australian women similar to the ones I’m reviewing. My pick of a match for Michael Robotham – based on a very small sample of his work – is Jaye Ford. Ford writes fast-paced action thrillers with a psychological edge. But maybe readers who are more familiar with his work will other ideas?

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/03/27/watching-you-by-michael-robotham/feed/0elizabethlhuederobotham watching youThe Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriartyhttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/03/13/the-husbands-secret-by-liane-moriarty/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/03/13/the-husbands-secret-by-liane-moriarty/#commentsThu, 12 Mar 2015 23:30:27 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4553]]>Liane Moriarty’s The Husband’s Secret is a page-turner featuring believable characters, interesting moral issues and more. I read it over the Australia Day weekend and the timing seemed fitting somehow. It could easily be subtitled, ‘A portrait of suburban Australian lives’.

The characters in this novel are ordinary, everyday people who inhabit Sydney’s north shore. They’re people like me, or my sisters, my friends, our mothers and daughters. Catholic-raised, but not observant; juggling haphazard careers and family responsibilities; coping with the ups and downs of problematic marriages, teenaged children, competitiveness, grandchildren, imperfect husbands, as well as past traumas that rise up in the present with unexpected and unpredictable consequences.

There’s Cecilia, the wife of the husband with a secret. She’s a perfectionist, a candidate for a diagnosis of OCD; impossibly organised, generous and thoughtful; quite possibly unbearable as a friend or family member, but also vulnerable and a loving mother.

There’s Rachel, an administrator at Cecilia’s son’s primary school; an aging grandmother who has never quite got over the death of her teenaged daughter, and finds it hard to show love to her adult son.

Then there’s Tess who, until a week ago, would have described her marriage as happy…

These characters’ lives intersect in a narrative that made me both laugh and cry as I identified with the experiences, thoughts, failings, fantasies and bad behaviour of normal human beings under pressure.

Books like this show me how ordinary lives can be extraordinary and interesting. Moriarty seems to write easy-to-read prose effortlessly, adding a degree of emotional truth that surprises me for popular fiction. No wonder she was recently voted Australia’s second-most popular author in a recent online bookshop poll.

Catriona and James are desperate for children, so embark on an IVF program. Four embryos are created, and by the third treatment Catriona is pregnant. They decide to adopt out the fourth embryo anonymously. (from publisher’s blurb)

I must admit, when a copy of Amanda Ortlepp’s debut novel, Claiming Noah, arrived in the post, I wasn’t sure I wanted to read it. My reluctance wasn’t due to the subject matter. I devoured both of Dawn Barker’s books, Fractured and Let Her Go, which deal with similar difficult subjects, including post-natal psychosis and issues relating to a child’s true (or legal) parentage. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to traverse similar territory in another novel.

Nevertheless, amid all the excitement of releasing my own debut novel this week,* I persisted, and I’m happy to report Claiming Noah is worth the read.

In Claiming Noah, Ortlepp creates a very Solomon-esque story in a contemporary setting, and teases it out to a tense and satisfying conclusion. Her point-of-view characters are Catriona, the donor mum, and Diana, who adopts Catriona’s embryo; both are sympathetic characters who go through a very rough time and deserve better. They have problems with husbands, newborns and adjusting to dramatic changes in their life circumstances; both suffer tragedy and deception which cause them heartache and take them to the brink.

At times when reading I found myself pulled out of the story thinking, She wouldn’t do that. Why doesn’t she…? But it’s a credit to Ortlepp that she is able to bring her characters to life so well that I began think I knew them!

Claiming Noah is billed as a thriller, but I think it’s more mainstream than that: I wouldn’t put the “thrills” at much more than you’d find in suspense (which is fine by me). There’s nothing externally life-threatening in this story; the life challenges, when they come, stem from the characters’ inner worlds, and the impact of external events on their psychological and mental health, which is only ever really severely tested for Catriona.

I read the novel over a few days and it kept me engaged – rather than “hooked” – for that time. (Considering I also had a lot going on with my own release, that’s no mean feat.) The moral dilemmas the novel presents are interesting, even if the references to the Catholic church’s influence seem a little dated. The ethical issues the story raises deserve to be explored. And what better way to explore them than in entertaining fiction?

* You can read about my debut romance, Snowy River Man, and enter a giveaway to win an ebook copy here.

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/02/27/claiming-noah-debut-psychological-suspense-by-amanda-ortlepp/feed/0elizabethlhuedeClaiming Noah by Amanda OrtleppToday’s the day – Snowy River Man released!http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/02/22/todays-the-day-snowy-river-man-released/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/02/22/todays-the-day-snowy-river-man-released/#commentsSat, 21 Feb 2015 23:33:43 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/02/22/todays-the-day-snowy-river-man-released/Lizzy Chandler:My debut romance novel Snowy River Man is released today. Snowy River Man is the story of city girl Katrina Delaney who dreams of a missing boy. She discovers it’s the son of a man she met years ago with whom she had a one night stand, Jack Fairley, a grazier from the…]]>

Snowy River Man is the story of city girl Katrina Delaney who dreams of a missing boy. She discovers it’s the son of a man she met years ago with whom she had a one night stand, Jack Fairley, a grazier from the Snowy Mountains Shire. Katrina is determined to help find Jack’s son, despite the painful memories that begin to surface, taking her back to a time in her life she would rather forget.

Here’s what one reviewer had to say:

I thoroughly enjoyed Snowy River Man which is the debut novel for Aussie author Lizzy Chandler. A nice mixture of suspense and romance, with a gritty plot and delightful characters; the word pictures painted of the countryside around the Snowy Mountains, the chill in the air, the blackness of the night sky plus the vividness and brightness of the stars…

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/02/13/stella-prize-longlist-announced-2/feed/0elizabethlhuedeimageSing You Home by Jodi Picoulthttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/30/sing-you-home-by-jodi-picoult/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/30/sing-you-home-by-jodi-picoult/#commentsThu, 29 Jan 2015 23:30:08 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4429]]>On the back cover of my copy of Jodi Picoult’s Sing You Home is a quote from Stephen King: “Picoult writes with unassuming brilliance.” High praise from a master storyteller. Judging from the two books of hers I’ve read so far, I’d have to agree.

Both The Tenth Circle and Sing You Home deal with domestic dramas and ethical issues. Both are lucidly written, with flashes of fine figurative language. Both use interesting structural scaffolding to support the story.

Whereas in The Tenth Circle, Picoult counterpoints the narrative with a graphic novel version of Dante’s Inferno, in Sing You Home she uses music. Each section of the novel is a musical “track” relating to alternating characters’ points of view: Max, a recovering alcoholic who compares himself unfavourably to his rich, born-again Christian brother; Zoe, a music therapist, and Max’s wife of nine years, with whom he has struggled unsuccessfully to have a baby; and Vanessa, a school counsellor and acquaintance of Zoe, who invites Zoe to her school to work with a suicidal teenager.

Part way through Sing You Home, the “music track” motif fades and segues into a courtroom drama. Zoe and Max battle it out over who has the right to a number of frozen embryos leftover from IVF treatment. Before the issue is resolved, Picoult touches on the question of the separation of the Church and State, and Christian dogma regarding homosexuality. In a tight, intelligent plot, Picoult conveys sympathy for – and insight into – characters of diverse opinion, behaviour and belief. There are twists and turns, and the climax is emotionally wrenching. It’s a very good read.

PS: Picoult’s publishers do her no favours with the girly cover. It barely relates to the story and screams “women’s fiction” or “book for women”. The issues the novel deals with deserve a wider audience.

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/30/sing-you-home-by-jodi-picoult/feed/0elizabethlhuedeimageAustralia Day Book Giveaway Blog Hophttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/24/australia-day-book-giveaway-blog-hop/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/24/australia-day-book-giveaway-blog-hop/#commentsSat, 24 Jan 2015 01:35:51 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4549]]>I’m participating in Book’d Out’s Australia Day Book Giveaway Blog Hop over on my Lizzy Chandler author site. Please visit for your chance to win a copy of Snowy River Man or (for Australian residents) another book of your choice.]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/24/australia-day-book-giveaway-blog-hop/feed/0elizabethlhuedeimageBefore I Met You by Lisa Jewellhttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/23/before-i-met-you-by-lisa-jewell/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/23/before-i-met-you-by-lisa-jewell/#commentsThu, 22 Jan 2015 23:30:17 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4397]]>It’s probably not fair to an author to start a book in the week leading up to Christmas, especially when you’re in the middle of moving house. That may explain why Lisa Jewell’s novel, Before I Met You, took me a few days to get into. Once I had a stretch of a few good reading hours, however, I became absorbed.

Before I Met You begins with the story of Betty who, as a child, goes with her mother and step-father to the Channel Island of Guernsey to live with her ageing step-grandmother, Arlette. Arlette lives as a near recluse, occupying a suite of rooms in a crumbling old house perched on a cliff facing the sea. Although she appears to dislike almost everyone, she takes a shine to Betty. She introduces her step-granddaughter to “glamour” and fashion, even though, by all accounts, she has never left Guernsey.

Reaching adulthood in the 1990s, Betty has grown fond of Arlette, even though the old woman is increasingly frail and suffers from dementia. After taking it upon herself to stay on the island to look after Arlette until her death, Betty is rewarded with a small legacy and a mystery: she must look for a girl by the name of “Miss Clara Pickle”, to whom Arlette has left part of her fortune. If Clara cannot be found within a year, the inheritance will be Betty’s. Her last known address is in London’s infamous red light district, Soho.

Eager for adventure and wanting to solve the mystery of the bequest, Betty travels to London and settles in Soho, using almost all of her legacy to rent a tiny studio. Before she can look into the mystery, she must first find a job, and this proves difficult. Eventually, she progresses from flipping burgers at Wendy’s to being the nanny for an estranged celebrity couple. In her spare time, she befriends a DJ who helps her follow clues Arlette has left as to Clara Pickle’s identity. Along the way, Betty discovers that her grandmother, far from being a recluse – albeit with a taste for finery and red satin shoes – once led a totally different life, one of excitement, fashion and glamour.

Running parallel to Betty’s story is the story of Arlette’s youth which is dramatised in interleaving flashbacks. Having come of age in the years following World War One, Arlette, a great beauty, travels from Guernsey to London to live with the family of an old friend of her mother. There, at the beginning of the jazz age of the 1920s, she meets Gideon Worsley, a Bohemian artist from a well-to-do family who insists on painting her portrait. Gideon introduces her to one of the great jazz musicians of the age, a black clarinet player from the Caribbean, whose stage name is “Sandy Beach”. Alongside Gideon and “Sandy”, Arlette – a shop girl, by day – frequents the fashionable night clubs of the era, mingling with the famous people who make up the fashionable pre-Bloomsbury set.

As the novel progresses, the two narrative threads converge and the mystery surrounding Arlette’s will is explained. In a dual climax, Betty and Arlette, their lives separated by a gap of seventy-five years, individually face difficult choices which will set the course for their futures.

Before I met You gives us a glimpse of post-World War One London when women were experiencing new freedoms, both in terms of economic opportunity and of social mobility; it also conveys the constraints facing women of that time. The lasting impression of the story for me, however, is one of sadness, with the realisation of how quickly and easily the lives of one generation may be forgotten by subsequent generations. It makes me wish my father’s mother, a contemporary of Arlette, had recorded her life story. It would fill in so many gaps.

~

Author: Lisa Jewell
Title: Before I Met You
Publisher: Century, Random House Group
Date: 2012

I borrowed a copy from the library.

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/23/before-i-met-you-by-lisa-jewell/feed/0elizabethlhuedeimageGolden Boys by Sonya Hartnetthttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/16/the-golden-boys-by-sonya-hartnett/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/16/the-golden-boys-by-sonya-hartnett/#commentsThu, 15 Jan 2015 23:45:58 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4507]]>There are some books I know, if I don’t attempt to review them straightaway, I won’t end up reviewing them at all. It’s because the impact is so powerful, the language so beautiful, I grow afraid I won’t do them justice. Golden Boys by Sonya Hartnett is one of those books.

I picked up this novel not knowing what audience it was written for – the only other book by Hartnett I’ve read is a children’s picture book. But this novel is no more suitable for children than Lord of the Flies. (Though I did read that when I was twelve.)

Golden Boys isn’t nearly as graphic and violent as Lord of the Flies, but its themes – including family violence, grooming, loneliness, isolation and dislocation – are pretty adult. So is the language. It’s rich, poetic, dense. And the pace is slow. Nothing much happens – and yet, everything happens; everything that is painfully ordinary, quotidian, that conveys the angsts and traumas of growing up and learning where one fits in the world.

The protagonists of Golden Boys are a group of kids in a working-class Australian suburb in the not-so-distant past. It is a time before the internet and Facebook, when children were allowed to roam the streets unsupervised, the era of the author’s own childhood, perhaps. It is also an era, seemingly, pre-multiculturalism and pre-contraception. Several of the children, Declan, Freya and Syd, belong to one household, a working class home with a drunken father, a harried mother, and too many younger siblings. Hartnett is precise in her description of the chaos that is the Kileys’ family life, with “the mess which finds its way through the house like the ratty hem of a juvenile junkyard”. When working-class Syd Kiley meets the neighbourhood newcomer and private-school educated Bastian Jensen, Hartnett deftly conveys their differences:

Syd and Bastian look at each other, and it’s like a Jack Russell being introduced to a budgerigar: in theory they could be friends, but in practice sooner or later there will be bright feathers on the floor.

But the conflict between the two families, the Kileys and the Jensens, isn’t due to class. The Jensens have moved into the neighbourhood to escape something, as Bastian’s older brother Colt becomes dimly aware. That “something”, barely acknowledged but frightening, provides one of the core tensions of the novel, and has to do with Colt’s father, Rex, a dentist. Rex has filled their new home with toys, bikes, skateboards, racing tracks; and their backyard will soon have a pool that all the neighbourhood children are invited to use. As Colt reflects:

His father spends money not merely on making his sons envied but in making them – and the world seems to tip the floor – enticing. His father buys bait.

It is how Colt responds to this growing awareness that leads to the climax and denouement on the novel. The ending is dramatic, though not externally earth-shattering, and conveys a sense of truth about the complexity of family loyalties and the burden of carried shame.

I was wondering, as I read the novel, whether it might be useful for HSC English teachers teaching the new “discovery” module. It deals with the theme of discovery in a number of ways: a new neighbourhood, how different classes live, as well as the discovery of growing up and taking responsibility. It’s also packed with language forms and features which students could explore. I read an ebook copy and kept interrupting my reading to highlight Hartnett’s skillful use of rhetorical devices, similes and metaphors. (A whole post could be devoted to such an analysis.)

Apart from its promise as an educational text, it is a worthwhile and moving book to read.

]]>http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/16/the-golden-boys-by-sonya-hartnett/feed/7elizabethlhuedegolden boys hartnettHappy birthday Dorothy Wall, creator of Blinky Billhttp://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/12/happy-birthday-dorothy-wall-creator-of-blinky-bill/
http://elizabethlhuede.com/2015/01/12/happy-birthday-dorothy-wall-creator-of-blinky-bill/#commentsSun, 11 Jan 2015 23:05:51 +0000http://elizabethlhuede.com/?p=4477]]>Dorothy Wall, author, illustrator and creator of the much-loved children’s book, Blinky Bill, was born on 12 January 1894 in Wellington, New Zealand, and first migrated to Australia in 1914. She died on 21 January 1942 at her home in Cremorne and was buried in the Northern Suburbs Cemetery.

Her entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography states that, at one time, she was a resident in the Blue Mountains at Warrimoo. (I wonder if her homes are still standing and whether either has a plaque?)

In 1985, Australia Post issued a commemorative stamp honouring the character Blinky Bill.

The text of Blinky Bill and its sequels are now out of copyright and are available for free download as ebooks from Project Gutenberg Australia: